Following last week’s readings on BHCR, my novel Leland Poet is available today on Kindle (here).

Magic, mystery and murder haunt a strange, brutal city…Some things are too grotesque, even for a world of supernatural nightmare. The eccentric, untrustworthy Leland Poet investigates: who is the killer, and what awakening evil is behind this reign of terror?When he becomes entangled with a woman at the heart of the horror… then becomes a suspect… Leland is forced to flee not only the city – but his own dimension…Social breakdown follows: martial law, savagery, an epidemic of violence and bizarre disease.Leland must find a way back to his reality, through eerie netherworlds, to confront fears half-forgotten – but far from dead.

…So goes the blurb. A little background here for the curious; basically it’s a vanity project, but I hope not an uninteresting one.

Something different… In a week’s time I’m back on Nigel Staley’s programme Under The Table onBrighton & Hove Community Radio, Thursday 27th June, 6 – 7pm. (Not bad going, considering the last occasion was only a couple of months back.) This time I’ll be performing eight spoken word pieces, with ambient interludes from Susumu Yokota’s album The Boy and the Tree. The pieces will include three extracts from this novel, Leland Poet – which I’m re-releasing onto Kindle the following week, on Monday 1st July.

It’s quite a step away from strumming guitar, but there’s many hooks to grip you with.

The short story compilation comprises previously-published tales and several new. The novel Leland Poet was issued in paperback in 2009, in an edition so badly-produced I asked Amazon to withdraw it from sale. Details are hazy, but it was an Arts Council funded publisher that went bust (or whatever) and passed their roster to a vanity press – who plopped out the manuscript with some crappy off-the-peg cover art and zero copy-editing for my numerous typos. I just washed my hands of it in disgust and went out of my way not to publicize it, for instance never mentioning it on here before. But having decided to DIY the short stories, I thought What the hell. Besides, this gave me a chance to substantially edit it.

Again, think of music and the new Just Get On With It ethic: this is all too familiar. But if that sounds gloomy, it needn’t – it’s quite a buzz revisiting this stuff and getting ready to hurl it back out onto the internet. More news soon.

[EDIT: As of 12th Dec 2012, The Gift of Fear is now available on Kindle for a princely sum: less than a 2nd-hand pulp paperback – the kind of thing it’s in the tradition of.]

[EDIT #2: Leland Poet is also now available – June ’13, a little later than planned, to coincide with the BHCR readings]